I was on the Facebook just now, and I glimpsed an ad in the sidebar. Facebook has a lot of trouble advertising to me, since I recently went through my profile and deleted every single bit of information I’d previously provided. So now it has very little to work with. Here are two things it knows: I play a horseback riding game, and I am currently in Syracuse, NY. So my ads are pretty much all geared to that now – either horses or “fun” stuff to do in Syracuse – except for some random ones for FASHION. I don’t know where that came from. Oh…yes I do. I’m female. Therefore I must love buying hideous dresses from websites I’ve never heard of.

So I glimpsed the sidebar, as I said, and I saw an ad that said, “Five things to do in Syracuse everyday.” I promptly clicked the little X in the upper right corner of the advertisement to make it go away. And Facebook does this thing where it gives you a list of reasons to choose from when you dismiss an ad. The reasons are:

– Uninteresting

– Misleading

– Sexually explicit

– Against my views

– Offensive

– Repetitive

– Other

(I used to get ads that said stuff like, “DO YOU LOVE TWILIGHT??? DO YOUUUU??” and I’m pretty sure I clicked the “Offensive” and “Against my views” buttons a couple times.)

For this ad, I clicked “Other.” And when you do that, it gives you a little box to type in your reason. I typed in, “This ad is grammatically incorrect. They used “everyday” and not “every day.” And that inspired me to tell this story on my blog, and also give a short grammar lesson, since this concept seems to be hard for some people to grasp.

“Everyday” is an adjective. You have everyday activities, like eating, sleeping, swimming, killing people’s dogs, and reading the newspaper. These everyday activities are things you do every day. See what I did there? “Everyday” is an adjective, and “every day” is an adjective describing a noun.

Every day, I stare out my window and make faces at passersby.

This ad is not seen every day.

I have many everyday routines.

This isn’t some kind of everyday threat.

Are we starting to see the difference? “Every day” is talking about the day. It’s a noun. You don’t see people writing, “Onceaday, I kick my bedroom wall.” No, they write, “Once a day.” Same thing with “Every day.” I think I’m getting a little repetitive here, but I really want to make sure I’m understood, because between you and me, I get a little annoyed when people blatantly disregard basic grammatical rules. And it’s not an uncommon occurrence either! It happens every day!

Word of the Day: Miffed (adj) – put into an irritable mood, especially by an offending incident.

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This is my blog archive. There are a lot of posts. Pick a random month and year. Start there.

This is my blog archive. There are a lot of posts. Pick a random month and year. Start there.